A work of his which has given me hours of enjoyment is still another book about cities. This is called Steden. The chapters on Constantinople and Venice are alluring. He came across from Trieste to Venice one hot August night, over night-black water, to be confronted at dawn with a golden city floating upon a lapis sea. It looked to him like something fabulous from the depths of the ocean. The decaying palaces resembled splendors seen only in a dream. The Bridge of Sighs made him think of melancholy Byron whose heart, he insists, lives on in Venice. He rejoiced in all the eloquent memories of Tintoretto, connoisseur of art that he is, and the past glories of the Republic.
The great canals were merely the mirrors of Venice, Queen of Cities.
Albert Besnard, the distinguished painter, after being for many years director of the school of art in Italy where the coveted Prix de Rome is given, turned to writing after he was an old man. And the book, properly enough, is about Rome: Sous le ciel de Rome. For this he was made an Académicien. And he deserves the honor. Only one or two other men, for a single work’s grace, have become members of L’Académie Française. Books of travel written by sensitive painters like Besnard are things rare and charming. In one place I recall, he exclaims: “I am standing alone at foot of stairway of the Capitol. Rome under the stars—what delight!” I think Besnard is quite as fine in prose as in the bejeweled, gauze-robed, almond-eyed beauties he painted in India.
Besnard remembers Marie Bashkirtseff, as he saw her once in her youth, standing beside a fountain in the gardens of the Villa Medici. She reminded him of a little golden, furred cat. He considered her fine instead of beautiful. His trained eyes found her arms too short. She was exquisite and fashionable, but she was too cold, and in her face there was no joy. Her originality, to him, was in her peculiar physical attractiveness, her elegance, and not in her conversation. He called her a poor, little child whose only pleasure was to design, then wear wonderful gowns, briefly, for the eye-pleasure of the Great Julian. He always remembered her own too cold, sharply expressive blue eyes.
His observations are arresting. He thinks it is the fatality of order and equilibrium with which modern youth can not put up. A balance is lost. Somewhere else he declares that grief is the ransom of genius. Only they who can suffer, arrive. Whenever he returns to Rome, he likes to pause a moment before entering his dwelling, on one of the hills, just for the pleasure of penetrating first with his eyes, the rich, grey, sculptured mass, which is the world’s incomparable wonder, Rome. He savored with pleasure the beauty of the sky that bends over the Deathless City; the grandeur, the severity of outline of Roman horizons; the deserted campagna; the mystery of magnificent palaces with their murmuring fountains, and above everything else, the peculiar charm of the people, who throughout the centuries have known how to keep vehement passions, the grace of the inspiring gesture, and beauty.
Writing from Rome again, he speaks of the winds of art which blow freshly in one’s face, to renew ideas, then strengthen intelligence. Besnard’s book is so alluring, every page of it, (and his book about India, too), that I should not like anyone to miss them. He is a great admirer of D’Annunzio. He writes of the splendor of the Italian poet’s soul on a par with the century-reinforced splendor of the Eternal City.
Sometimes when I read D’Annunzio I feel that he has moulded sentences, phrases, upon the proud painted canvasses of the past of his native land. His prose approaches the sumptuous completeness of Veronese. His old gardens of Rome have the poignancy of personal regret. Listen to this: “Even the garden was dull and sleep held. It was imbued with silence as rich as honey, as thick and heavy as wax, as precious gums. There was abandon and sadness, which exhausted themselves in belated perfume ... from here one could glimpse a pallid swamp with too tall lilies; yellow, heavy with pollen.”
Once when D’Annunzio was ill with fever he dreamed nightly of the rich gardens of Rome, with their fountains.
Of the kind of writing D’Annunzio does, there is not another example in the world today. I fancy there will not be another, until the age of mechanism, scientific mind, reaches its height, and passes. All things perish after they flower, even the ages.